


build a home

by krakens



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-01
Updated: 2014-05-01
Packaged: 2018-01-21 13:43:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1552517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/krakens/pseuds/krakens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Emma ducks out of the hospital while everyone's waiting for news on Mary Margaret's baby and Hook catches up with her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	build a home

After the boathouse, Hook lays low. He’s resolved to give Emma space. He doesn’t leave; she may not trust him anymore, but she never once asked him to leave, and he won’t until the minute she tells him to.

His resolution lasts all of a few hours, though.

 He’s sulking around Granny’s Diner when he first catches wind of the news – one of the dwarfs mentions it coming in – that Mary Margaret has gone into labor. He doesn’t say a word to anyone, doesn’t feel a need to, just picks himself up and leaves. The sun’s gone down, and an eerie quiet has settled over the entire town like a dusting of snow. There’s something in the air – a hum of anticipation, a sense of dread – but he doesn’t mind. The witch won’t come for him, not now, and even if she did he wouldn’t care.

There are a handful of people in the hospital waiting room already. Henry, Regina, Robin Hood, Ruby. A few spare dwarfs. Emma and David aren’t among the number and everyone is absorbed in their own worries and fears, drawn into themselves. The only person who notices him at first is Tinker Bell, who gives a little wave and a tentative smile before turning her attentions back to Regina.

He lingers for the briefest moment, wanting to stay, but it’s not his place and he knows it. He turns to leave, hoping to slip out unnoticed, but he doesn’t get away before someone calls his name.

“Hey, Killian,” Henry says, and he feels like he’s frozen in his skin. He turns half around and nods his recognition to the boy, unable to ignore him, but he really does have to leave. “My mom’s outside, I think,” Henry goes on.

“Thank you,” Hook says, clearing his dry throat as he speaks. He starts to leave again, but Henry’s up out of his seat and trailing along behind him.

“Wait,” he says, and Hook does. They’re just outside of the waiting room now, just out of earshot of everyone else but still in their sightlines. Hook feels Regina’s gaze on him for a second and then notices that she too turns her attention elsewhere, unconcerned. “Mom’s really mad at you,” Henry says after a moment.

Hook’s hand goes to scratch his ear reflexively. “I’d noticed,” he says. Henry hadn’t been there to hear their conversation, but seems current on the family ideologies. It’s not surprising, given how close they are. How few secrets they now have between them.

“She keeps saying, you know, _I can’t believe I was wrong_ ,” Henry says, motioning vaguely with his hands as he speaks to imply a watery quality to the sentiment that Hook wouldn’t associate with the words. “That’s how she says it. _I can’t believe it_.”

“Oh?” Another lifetime, Hook might have harbored a growing ire during this conversation, which seems wholly unnecessary. But now, well. He just doesn’t have it in him.

“Mhmm,” Henry goes on. “And I really don’t think she does. Believe it. I think she knows she’s wrong. Or that she was right about you the first time.” Henry pauses for a moment as if waiting for him to respond but he doesn’t dare interrupt. “So, she’s angry now but she’ll figure it out eventually. I know she will. It just might take some time.”

Hook just nods. “Thank you,” he says again, and this time he means it as much more than just a pleasantry.

“No problem,” Henry says. “And I want to thank you too.”

“For bringing you back?”

Henry nods. “Yeah, that. And just for… being around,” he says.

“You don’t have to thank me for that,” he says. _You shouldn’t thank me for that_ , he thinks. He hasn’t done anything worth gratitude.

A strange look darts across Henry’s face, something between wary and wistful, before he schools his expression just like Hook’s seen Emma do so many times before. He gives a smile and a resolute nod and says “I know, but I’m doing it anyway.”

And with that Henry goes to rejoin the group, leaving Hook alone in the lobby.

He spends a moment steeling himself and then marches forward.

It doesn’t take him long to find Emma. She’s not by the pedestrian entrance where he came in, but in the adjacent roundabout, partially obscured by an idle ambulance. She’s sitting on a wooden bench, knees knocked together, feet apart, face in her hands. He might not have seen her at all, tucked away in a corner in her dark clothes, but her golden hair catches the light from the streetlamps, bright as a signal fire.

As he approaches her he makes his footfalls heavy as to not startle her, and when he’s maybe twenty paces away she finally looks up, eyes and nose red but not teary. When she sees him there her mouth draws into a thin line, corners pulling down the slightest degree.

“What are you doing here?” she asks with the cadence of an accusation.

“Looking for you,” he says.

She lets out a long breath through her nose, pressing her folded hands against her cheek as she looks at him. “I’m fine,” she says, sounding defensive apropos of nothing, and he can’t help but glance around the little dimly lit corner of the hospital courtyard she’s sequestered herself away in. She must catch the look on his face because she sighs again, louder, and leans her head back to look up at the ivy-tangled lattice overhang above them.

She is silent for a very long time, gaze angled heavenward, and it honestly feels like years before she speaks again.

“Okay,” she says. “Maybe I’m not entirely fine.”

Without further remark, she scoots over on the bench, making room for him there. He hesitates.

“I’m not gonna kiss you,” she says, point-blank, with that dry frankness only she can muster.

He shuffles a few inches closer before crossing the distance in just a few steps. He sits down as far from her as he can manage, with her on one arm of the bench and him on the other, a solid foot of space between them.

“Anyway,” she says. “There’s about a hundred problems that still need solving and this baby’s coming at the worst time. Not to mention nobody’s seen Zelena since this afternoon. She could turn up any second.”

“But that’s not what’s bothering you,” he says. She looks up at him, surprised, and then her eyebrows knit together like she’s a child about to have a temper tantrum.

“No it’s not,” she says, shaking her head and looking down where she holds her gloves in her lap.

“What’s the matter?” he asks.

She inhales a deep, shaky breath. Lets it out slowly. Breathes in, out, until her breathing is normal again. It only takes a few seconds altogether. “You know when I was a kid, I was in the foster system – it’s – people take the foster kids cause they get money for it, and they usually don’t keep them for more than a few – it’s temporary,” she says, cutting the fractured train of thought short very abruptly.

He nods. He remembers her speech about counting days clear as anything. It’s stuck with him.

“Anyway, before I was in foster care, a family had adopted me. They wanted to be – like Regina raised Henry,” she suggests, and he understands what she’s doing now. Trying to explain the context of her life in terms not personal to her. It’s only for his benefit, since her world is not his. He flexes his fingers. All this time he’s been clenching his fist, nails biting into skin, and he’d hardly even notice. “But then they had their own kid and they gave me up.”

Everything’s been coming together in his mind haltingly, but with that, the pieces slam into place. He very nearly stops her, because there have been so many things, so many old scars that pain him, which he’s wanted to share with her but never has. There are some bridges that can’t be uncrossed. They’re coming to a threshold he never thought they’d reach, and he’s not sure he’s ready for that, can’t believe she’s even considering it.

But he doesn’t say anything. He just examines the soft curve of her cheekbone as her damp eyelashes flutter against it. She looks up at him very suddenly, and the emotion on her face just about does him in.

“Mary Margaret, I know – I _know_ she loves me,” Emma says, jaw clenching. “But what she said in the Echo Caves, it made me feel so…” Her mouth works for a moment longer, but no words come out.

“Alone,” he says. She looks at him, nods, and looks away.

“Rootless,” she says, an addition and not a correction.

“I know the feeling,” he says.

Her eyes narrow immediately and she looks back at him, scanning his face carefully. She’s done this so many times before – she’s always searching for something when she looks at him, puzzling out a question with an answer she expects to find in his brow, or his eyes, or his lips.

“I believe that,” she says at length.

He runs his thumb across his knuckles idly, looking down at his hand as a silence lulls between them. When he takes a deep breath to speak, she looks out and away from him, towards the blackness of the night. “I know your trust isn’t a thing easily earned,” he begins, but she interrupts him before he can continue.

“I didn’t mean that,” she says – knowing, like she always does, his exact purpose. “I was mad at you. I’m still mad at you,” she corrects without even taking a breath or giving a moment’s pause, but the emotion behind her words is so much softer than it was last time.

“I haven’t been thinking clearly,” he says.

“Neither have I,” she murmurs. “I’ve been – when it comes to Henry, I’ve been selfish.” He looks at her, trying to parse what she means. He’s always known her to be singularly selfless when it comes to her son, can’t possibly imagine what she’s talking about.

“Everything you do is for him,” he says. When she catches his eye, she offers him a sad smile.

“Not this,” she says. “Not keeping his memories from him. I mean – I did want him to be happy, of course I want him to be safe, but there was a little part of me that was being selfish, and that’s all that matters.”

Hook disagrees fairly vehemently, but it doesn’t seem the moment to pick an argument.

“Everything I’ve been feeling about my parents…” She pauses for a second, like the words are sticking in her throat retrospectively. “And the baby… it’s just made me realize that that feeling – that loneliness – it’s _never_ going away. I’m always going to feel like that, no matter what they say or do, and… I didn’t want him to feel that way. Not about me.”

He wets his lips before he replies. “Henry…” he begins, picking his words carefully. “He’s been brought up by some extraordinary people. People who’re unusually brave, and resilient, and pure-hearted, and…” She looks him right in the eyes and his tongue stops working for a second as he tries to find a word that could possibly encompass her. There isn’t one, but he tries. “And strong.” She swallows, her head ducking down. He goes on. “And there might be a lot of bad blood between you, but Henry, he’s got the best of all of you.”

She smiles, and it’s only with half her mouth but it’s a genuine smile. She has a bright conviction in her eyes, and she opens her mouth to speak, considering her words. “Killian,” she says, and that’s all he can bear to let her say.

“I’ve been lying to you,” he says. Her smile grows tight but she doesn’t frown.

“I know,” she says.

“No more of that,” he says. She raises an eyebrow, questioning, bemused. He takes a breath and he tells her.

He tells her everything.

He starts with the moment he walked away from her family to search for a ship he thought was his home. He tells her about every person he met, every person he wronged, every crime and injustice he committed. About what he did to Ariel. How the witch tricked him into swearing on her name (here, he leaves out one detail – but it’s one he’ll come back to, when the time is right). He tells her how he gave up his ship to get to New York.

She’s been very quiet the entire time, occasionally nodding or murmuring single words of understanding, but here she interjects. “But,” she starts, eyelids fluttering in thought. “It was your home.”

“You’re my home,” he says, because that’s the truth.

She stares at him, gape-mouthed, and for all that he can read her like a book he has no idea what the expression on her face is – if it’s shock, or hope, or something else entirely. He couldn’t say. She closes her mouth and glances down at her hands, his gaze following hers instinctively. She flexes her fingers experimentally, and then she reaches for his face.

He flinches away without even thinking about it.

“It’s okay,” she says, and reaches for him again, and for some reason – for _some_ reason he just can’t move away. Her fingertips brush against his cheek, the pad of her thumb coming dangerously close to his lips.

His stomach lurches uncomfortably and he reaches up to wrap his fingers loosely around her wrist, to still her hand.

“I think I know how to take care of this curse,” she says, and he can’t look her in the eyes, focusing instead on where his fingers are grasping at the fabric of her coat sleeve. There is no air between them, his lungs can find no purchase.

Somewhere far away from them, by the doors of the hospital, there is the sound of a sudden dull commotion and someone calls her name. They stand at the same time, getting to their feet just as David finds them.

“Emma,” he says again, his gaze landing on Hook for just a second before skipping down to where their hands are still brushing together. He shakes his head, dazed. “Emma,” he says a third time. “We have to go. There’s trouble. Zelena – it’s – bad,” he says, and with that he’s already off and Emma is following her father, her hand falling away from his.

As she goes, she turns back for a half second. “Later,” she says to him. He nods, out of words, rooted in place as she moves. She beckons him along with a nod of her head, and that’s all it takes. “You’re coming with me,” she says, and it’s not a question, not really, because he’s already following.


End file.
